In 1984 here in America there appeared the anthology Supermen, the third volume of the Isaac Asimov's Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction series. A British edition followed in 1988. We here at MPorcius Fiction Log have read seven stories from the book (links to the appropriate blog posts below) and today read three more. To experience these super stories yourself, in the very form in which I will be reading them, try this link.
"Un-Man" by Poul Anderson (1953)
Cripes, this is a long one! Over 80 pages here in
Supermen! It had better be good! Life is short, Poul!
It is the future--the 21st century! Much of Chicago has been abandoned, its streets full of grass and broken glass and rats. The highways are similarly crumbling. People in Illinois now live in skyscraper apartment buildings 300 stories high, two miles long, with a view of the vast corn fields, get where they want to go via airboats and moving sidewalks, and have group marriages or open relationships instead of monogamous marriages. Donner is an agent of the United Nations, living in just such a building, eight floors above the secret regional HQ of a subversive political party. We follow him as he sneaks into the troublemakers' apartment, makes a mistake and gets captured, and then is tortured. The self-destruct device in his skull kills him before he can reveal any info. Anderson handles the SF setting and the espionage business in these first two chapters in an entertaining way, so I stopped worrying abut the length of the story.
Chapter III sees us on Mars, where man first set foot thirty years ago, a tough frontier world where colonies are slowly expanding. We meet Rosenberg, a Jewish guy who has been living and working on Mars for some time, but after an injury has to return to Earth, to retire, he no longer being strong enough to endure the endless danger and risk that is life on the red planet. Before he leaves, he checks in with a friend in the domed city from which his ship to Earth will depart, a medical man and researcher who has, by studying Martian flora and fauna, perhaps discovered a means of putting humans into suspended animation. Also visiting this doctor is a Pilgrim, a member of a fanatical and anti-Semitic sect, come to Mars to build a new Jerusalem. Rosenberg finds this joker, and an American flag he spots nearby, distasteful, and hopes the UN will soon seize control of Mars and all the planets and all ethnic and national distinctions will be dissolved.
In Chapter IV we meet Naysmith, the UN agent who will be taking over for Donner. Donner and Naysmith are both members of what everyone keeps calling The Brotherhood, a cadre of super agents whom, it is strongly implied, are clones, and we learn a little more about conditions on Earth, how the world has been through a period of chaos and the UN, through any means necessary--including assassination and coups d'etat of independent-minded governments--is trying to keep that chaos from returning. Many individual governments, like that in the United States, still have some independence, and there are both pro- and anti-world government members in the US Congress, wrangling over how much power to hand over to the UN--the USA has already handed over its moon bases to the UN, but conservatives and UN skeptics have maintained a security apparatus independent of the UN, and as part of its counter-espionage activities it hunts down members of the Brotherhood. As the story proceeds, Anderson elides any distinctions among the various anti-UN groups, suggesting the federal governments security forces and anti-UN terrorists are all one and the same.
In Chapters V and VI Naysmith goes into action. He looks and acts much like Donner, who was one of the few people in this world who had a monogamous marriage. So he goes to Donner's house to impersonate the dead man, fooling his wife and child. Mrs. Donner could be useful to the anti-UN radicals whom Donner was killed by, so Naysmith wants to get her out of the area ASAP, but federal agents appear soon after Naysmith does and he and Mrs. Donner have to shoot their way out of the house to Naysmith's aircraft--they survive because they are shooting to kill and the enemy is trying to capture them. The fugitives fly to a hideout in the mountains in Chapters VII and VIII. Throughout these four chapters we get history lessons on post-WWII developments that justify the UN taking over the world and assassinating people and overthrowing national governments.
Naysmith leaves Mrs. Donner in a well-supplied cabin high in the Rockies without fessing up to the fact that he is not her husband, and gets down to work, capturing an anti-UN rebel and using a truth drug to interrogate him, learning how Rosenberg and the Puritans on Mars fit into the plans of the anti-UN faction, and then murdering him. In Chapter IX, Naysmith works with a fellow member of The Brotherhood (the UN has hundreds of such clones, geniuses who all quote Shakespeare and have perfect physiques, with which to take over the world I mean save the world) to rescue Rosenberg from anti-UN thugs who try to kidnap the guy as he gets off the ship from Mars. In Chapter X, Rosenberg, under hypnosis, tells all about the suspended animation theories he learned on Mars. We also get a lecture on how human society has gotten so complex we need an elite to manage our lives--the clones will be this elite. Reminding us of the Nexialism in the book version of A. E. van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle, there is a new science abroad, Synthesis, that combines all the old sciences, and members of the elite that will rule the world are learning it.
Human society had grown too big, too complex and powerful. It was a machine running blind and wild....The sciences had grown too big and complex, like everything else, and there was too much overlap between the specialties. Further progress required 'the fully trained synthesizing mentality.
Naysmith leaves Rosenberg with Mrs. Donner and admits to her that her husband is dead and he is an imposter.
A Synthesis-trained clone conceives a cunning plan that involves Naysmith allowing himself to be captured by the enemy, and so in Chapter XI our hero is in captivity being studied and interrogated by the anti-UN faction, who don't know about the clones yet but suspect something is up because, unnervingly, they keep having to fight guys who look like guys they have already killed, keep finding evidence--fingerprints and so forth--that the same man has been in two places at once. (One of the remarkable things about "Un-Man" is that Anderson never uses the word "clone" and most of the characters seem to have never even heard of the concept of clones.) During the interrogation, Naysmith humiliates the anti-UN people by psychoanalyzing them, telling the woman rebel that she is a rebel because she is ugly and can't get a man, another guy that he is a sadist, another that he is anti-UN because he is an exogene grown in a vat and growing to life outside a woman's womb made him insane, etc. It is implied that the leader of this regional anti-UN group is against the UN world government because he suffered homosexual rape as a child. Throughout the story, Anderson characterizes opposition to the UN not as a matter of ideological commitment, but as a symptom of insanity, equates anti-UN opinions with sickness.
In Chapter XII Rosenberg and Mrs. Donner talk and we learn Rosenberg's back story and that he knew the genius who was the source of the gene plasm that was used to produce the clones that today form The Brotherhood, a guy who fought for the UN in various wars on Earth and then went to space and invented a very useful valve. Anderson lays it on pretty thick--this guy knew a dozen languages, had more appreciation of fine literature than a college professor, was a musician and a painter and a photographer and so forth. A superman! Supes was Rosenberg's best friend on Mars, and died at age 60 in an accident--at 60 he was a physical match for other men who were in their 20s, and died while saving Rosenberg's life during a cave-in.
In Chapter XIII Naysmith and three other Brothers are in the secret anti-UN base on an Atlantic sea station where they meet the big boss of all the various anti-UN groups. Before anything interesting can happen, a UN assassin, yet another clone, kills this boss of bosses, resolving the story's plot. In the fourteenth and final chapter Naysmith indulges in reflections on how the superior Brotherhood of clones may have defeated the current threat to world government, but will have to remain in action because other mentally ill people will no doubt rise up to oppose the rule of the UN. Then, reminding us of goings on in Elsinore and the Biden household, Naysmith hooks up with Mrs. Donner--our superiors act in curious ways.
We might compare "Un-Man" to Philip E. High's "Pseudopath," which also features a behind-the-scenes struggle in which the good guys have to resort to ruthless extralegal methods for the good of humanity and who try to break the morale of the enemy by trickery about the capabilities of their superman. And to Larry Niven's "Death by Ecstasy," in which the hero is captured and tortured and guides his comrades to the enemy leader while using psychology to rattle his captors.
Obviously, I myself am not a cheerleader for the UN or world government, if only because a majority of people beyond the borders of the United States are committed to socialism and/or Islam and have no interest in free speech, trial by jury, or private property (only half the people within the borders of the United States fit that description) and I don't favor having such people ruling over me. And I find the rank elitism of "Un-Man" distasteful. This makes it hard for me to really become immersed in "Un-Man" and sympathize with Donner and Naysmith, even though it seems like Anderson was envisaging a UN that stood for truth, justice, and the American way and fought against commies and jihadis. It doesn't help that Anderson doesn't actually make much of a case for the UN and world government, mostly just asserts it and tells you any who disagree with his unargued case are mentally ill.
The political and philosophical themes of "Un-man" lacking heft, we have to judge it on its science fiction ideas and its thriller aspects and its human relationships, and those are not bad, though the jack-of-all-trades nature of the clones, who are geniuses in every field of endeavor, and the science of Synthesis, are a little hard to take (though they perfectly exemplify the superman theme of this anthology.) I guess in the end I can mildly recommend "Un-Man."
"Un-Man" is a part of Anderson's Psychotechnic League series, a future history he didn't name himself and which is very distinct from the more libertarian Technic League that features interstellar businessman Nicholas van Rijn and imperial agent Dominic Flandry. "Un-Man" seems to have been a success, debuting as a cover story of Astounding and reappearing in several anthologies and Anderson collections.
"After the Myths Went Home" by Robert Silverberg (1969)
Continuing the trend of stories the politics of which get on my nerves, in the first paragraph of "After the Myths Went Home," the narrator praises Marx, Lenin and Bonaparte and criticizes Winston Churchill. You see, it is the 125th century, and the people of the far future can "call up" people from the past to talk to them. Then they decide to call up fictional characters, specifically figures of myth and legend which were central to the efforts of ancient people to understand and give order to the universe. I guess these are simulations based on records or something--Silverberg isn't clear, and it doesn't matter because this is not a "real" science fiction story but a gimmicky New Wave joke story that I found kind of irritating.
Adam and Eve are called up, then Pan (he has sex with some guy's wife, but it is OK because this is the promiscuous future and hubby is proud to be cuckolded by a simulation of a god) and then Silverberg gives a long list of characters from Greek and Roman literature, Native American religion, Norse Myth, blah blah blah. Then Catholic saints, and then Galileo and Newton and Einstein, I guess Silverberg making the point that people in the 20th century use science to make sense of the universe and comfort them and justify their behavior much like people of the past used religion. Then Abraham Lincoln and JFK. Another of Silverberg's points is that we mythologize people of the past, and real people like Galileo and Freud, called up, bear the attributes of gods, being 15 feet tall and crackling with electricity and so on.
JFK is the last of these mythological figures called up, and we are told that in the 21st century and later there were no more myths because life had become so easy and so myths were not needed. The people of the future interact with the called up gods and heroes for a while, and then send them back. The called up Cassandra warns that a society needs myths, that one without myths is doomed, and, sure enough, after the gods and heroes are all gone, space aliens conquer the Earth and enslave everybody.
A lazy waste of time. Science fiction writers will ofttimes refer to Shakespeare or T. S. Eliot or W. B. Yeats or whoever in their stories to show off how learned they are, and such name dropping is fine as a little spice or color or as a way to emphasize a point, but this entire story is nothing but such references, like a big slab of icing with no cake beneath it. Thumbs down!
"After the Myths Went Home" first wasted the time of readers of F&SF, and the SF community has embraced it the way a circa 1950s Poul Anderson embraced the UN. Donald Wolheim and Terry Carr selected it for World's Best Science Fiction 1970--Silverberg's name is at the top of the list on the cover!--and in 2004 Stefan Rudnicki chose it to be the title story of the first volume of his anthology series Imaginings (I don't know if there was ever a second volume.) You guys are cheap dates--a story isn't good just because a guy typed out a list of names he could have got from the Oxford Dictionary of the Classical World!
"Brood World Barbarian" by Perry A. Chapdelaine (1969)
Chapdelaine was a mathematician who published a few novels and over a dozen short stories and was one of the editors of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s letters. I don't think I've ever read anything by him. "Brood World Barbarian" debuted in
If, and reappeared twice, here in
Supermen and in the 1989 anthology
Space Gladiators.
This is an adequate filler piece. Our narrator, as a child, was plucked from his barbaric world by the slavers of a high tech monarchy planet ruled by a dictator and inhabited by bloodthirsty sports fans. The narrator's people are so primitive they don't even have names! Trained as a gladiator and educated via machine so that he can quote Plato and Ben Franklin, Lewis Carrol and Shakespeare, he was thrown into the arena and has had a long successful career; currently he is one of the most famous and popular gladiators. He hates the dictator and has sworn revenge on him--at the same time, he has fallen in love with the dictator's beautiful daughter and has sworn to possess her. The daughter, he feels, signaled her desire for him with her eyes one day when the royal family visited the slave quarters.
The gladiators don't fight with swords or spears or whatever, as they usually do in these kinds of stories, but with pressor beams and tractor beams, which allow them to jump around the arena like John Carter on Mars or Kal El on Terra as well as tear each other limb from limb from a distance. The dictator throws our guy into the arena with a giant reptile man from a high gravity planet who is much stronger than the human narrator and also has armored skin. The narrator's long experience gives him an edge, though. As normally happens in these gladiator stories, the narrator makes a deal with the reptile man on the floor of the arena while crowds are watching. I always think these scenes are a manifestation of left wing wish fulfillment, that they represent the socialists' dream that the white working class will ally with the black lower class, or immigrants, or Muslims, or whoever, to massacre the bourgeoisie. Anyway, our narrator and the reptile man use their pressor beams to propel the narrator out of the arena and into the stands where he kills many spectators and guards and escapes, the first gladiator to ever escape the arena.
The narrator makes it to the mountain snows, but eventually the dictator and his men catch up to him. He is taken to the mines, like so many people in science fiction stories. He escapes the mines, killing many prisoners and guards in the process, and then is captured by illegal wildcat miners from some other planet. The three men travel through space, but then the government space fleet detects them and pursues them; the criminals crash land on a planet and are killed, while the gladiator survives and takes cover in a jungle where he has to fight monsters. The creatures in this jungle sense emotion and can be manipulated by projecting the emotions they respond to.
The gladiator marches for thousands of miles through the jungle, occasionally hiding from space ships that are hunting him. Eventually he decides to attract one of the ships, thinking to capture it. He learns that he is a hero back on the monarchical planet, renowned as the greatest gladiator of all time and awarded his freedom by the dictator.
Back on the dictator's planet the narrator has to fight that reptile man again--this hulking brute has been acting champion in the narrator's absence. Being out of practice, our guy can't beat the lizard man until he uses what he learned on the jungle planet to project emotions onto the scaly athlete that bring him to his knees. The reptile man is popular enough that the crowd insists his life be spared.
The narrator now lives as a free civilian, and plots his revenge on the king. He gets a better education from better machines, and tries to kill the king, but is captured again. He realizes he no longer wants to kill the king, no longer hates him, and is freed.
Then comes the twist ending. Centuries ago mankind built a vast space empire and then it collapsed, leaving many colonized planets to fall into savagery or barbarism. The genetic stock back on Earth was attenuated, weak. So the leaders of Earth decided to send forth space ships to capture humans who had been mutated, who had evolved, under alien suns, and bring them back to Earth to be tested in the arena! The monarchical planet is Earth! The strongest, the smartest, the most courageous, having proven their worth in the arena, are allowed to contribute to the gene pool. The dictator himself was a gladiator once! And our narrator succeeds the dictator to become dictator himself and continue the practice of kidnapping promising specimens and throwing them into the arena for the pleasure of the bloodthirsty crowd.
Not a bad story, but no big deal. Like so many of the stories in Supermen, it is terribly elitist, and justifies or even romanticizes throwing the liberal norms that have made life in the Anglophonic West so prosperous and comfortable right into the garbage if the stakes are high enough. The superman is above conventional morality!
**********
So we bid farewell to Supermen. A worthwhile exploration. What's up next at MPorcius Fiction Log? Even I don't know! But stay tuned regardless. No doubt something will happen.
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